The School Shooter Mod, Part 2

[wadark]

I have to agree with Bob, and strongly disagree with Jim.

Why does our discussion of games always come in two parts: mechanical execution and narrative. Almost every reviewer does it. And what's worse, each reviewer almost always treats one as more important than the other. Yahtzee, for instance, seems to treat game mechanics as far more important than story (see Portal 2 review).

Granted, being that games are interactive by their very nature, this stance sort of makes sense, but that doesn't mean that the narrative of the game is to be dismissed. And, to be fair, Yahtzee did balance it out toward the end of the review.

My point, however, still stands, and that is why I disagree with Jim. As far as School Shooter is concerned, he is divorcing the mechanics and narrative of the game and trying to claim that school shooter is, at the very least, not "bad" because it doesn't try to be pretentious and vaguely justify its killing with a paltry context, like GTA.

But I stand by my point when I posted on the previous part's comments, that the context does make a difference. I expand that point now by saying that we can't divorce the context/narrative from the mechanics and judge a game as good or bad simply based on one or the other. Even GTA has a context and as far as the context is concerned, the Silent Guy, Tommy Verceti, and Niko Bellic didn't go on those random killing rampages. They killed the people in the way to their goal, and the people who were trying to kill them. I mean, why is that not an acceptable context in a game, but Scarface is a highly-held piece of art in the exact same context?

The two aspects of gaming are together, and have to be treated as such when trying to make an "objective" classification of good or bad. A game can't generally be "good" based only on mechanics, or based only on story. Sure, as a player, I love Shenmue because I love its story, even though its mechanics are kinda crap. But I gave up long ago trying to explain this to people who don't like it, and I totally get why they don't like the game.

But I digress, context and mechanics are two sides of one coin, two halves of a whole (cliche power activate ^_^), you can't judge a game based on one or the other. And you can't say that School Shooter somehow has merit (or even that it doesn't lack merit) because it's "honest" about it's subject matter, as opposed to all those games that are giving a "flimsy" excuse for the killing.

 

[JMeganSnow]

Tact: skill in dealing with difficult or delicate situations. First definition I got from googling the word.

And it's still the wrong word for James to use in that last sentence of his. People often don't know where their idiomatic expressions come from so they use the wrong words within them a lot. Taking a different tack was originally a nautical expression. It's now used to mean that you're attempting a different approach. It doesn't have anything to do with tact of any definition.

 

[Falseprophet]

Re: BioWare--romance is a frequent subplot in genre fiction, and especially epic fantasy and space opera, the two genres BioWare plays with the most. And rather than making the love interest a mere trophy to be won (eg, DragonQuest) or a scripted, non-interactive romance (eg, Final Fantasy VII), BioWare tries to make it part of the actual "role-playing". You can quibble with the execution, or maybe the romance is not to your taste, but to suggest it's tacked on would be wrong.

It's like the difference between Atlas Shrugged (Part 1 of 3!!!!) and Iron Man 2. They come from the same source material (awful objectivist bull, from my perspective) with the same basic story in mind, but while one is awful one is a lot of fun. I find the source material reprehensible but still enjoyed Iron Man 2 and would call it 'good'.

Apologies for going off-topic, but I find it hilarious that some libertarians/Objectivists hold up Tony Stark in Iron Man 2 as some kind of personal hero, while completely ignoring the fact that he and his father built their business empire almost entirely on government contracts paid for with taxpayer dollars.

 

[jmarquiso]

But I digress, context and mechanics are two sides of one coin, two halves of a whole (cliche power activate ^_^), you can't judge a game based on one or the other. And you can't say that School Shooter somehow has merit (or even that it doesn't lack merit) because it's "honest" about it's subject matter, as opposed to all those games that are giving a "flimsy" excuse for the killing.

You know what, I'm going to say it.

Narrative IS a game mechanic. No, it isn't an automated rule or system that's in place to make the game a game, but it IS what provides context for the story. Back in the day it was the arcade cabinet - with all of the artwork so we can make sense of the pixels. Later it was manuals of mythology and backstory. Later it was cutscenes that interrupted gameplay. Today, it's much more integrated, and that's a direction we should head in. Story can and should be told through gameplay, and they should be part of the whole.

Without context, Monopoly is just a game where one trades pieces of paper for other pieces of paper. The money, the deeds, etc, that's all part of the context and provide the value to the individual pieces.

Of course, this isn't always the case. Most modern games (particularly of the cutscene, gameplay, cutscene style) have the games narrative get in the way of the games themselves. But games work best where the narrative is woven into everything - from the rules, the art direction, and on. A sound game design SHOULD include a cohesive narrative flow.

 

[RJ Dalton]

You know what would have been great? If all involved parties had answered the question of whether or not the mod was worth the attention by not saying anything. That would have been hilarious and meaningful.

 

[Dastardly]

Extra Consideration: The School Shooter Mod, Part 2

The boys finally finish off the School Shooter mod.

Read Full Article

Sorry, Jim. I think you're just trying too hard to be an apologist on behalf of this game. And as hard as you're trying, the folks behind School Shooter are equally not trying. And that's the problem.

Making a game that is unapologetically about awful things (in whatever guise "awful" may take) is one thing. There's a certain amount of honesty to it, yes. Duke Nukem has that sort of "internal honesty." School Shooter does not.

What makes the difference? Credibility, for one. In a legendary "dick move" in music, John Cage premiered a work entitled 4'33" in 1952. It was basically four minutes and thirty-three seconds of a musician sitting silently on a stage. The idea behind it is that the sounds of the environment were the actual music, or so goes the claim. It's still a controversial piece in the discussion of what is/isn't music.

Now, let's say I pulled a stunt like that. Not even a blip on the radar. Why? For starters, Cage did it in the 1950's. But also, Cage composed a lot of great music before and after that. He demonstrated that he can do a lot of great stuff with music, and in doing so assured the public that the oddity of something like 4'33" was by choice.

See, an artist really only has two places in which to display mastery--mastery of the medium (technique within the medium), and mastery of the message (the ability to convey a "theme," in whatever form that might take). Cage established his credentials in the area of medium, and then set it aside for sake of message--but without the context created by his earlier demonstrations of mastery, it would just have been dismissed as a bullshit stunt.

The folks behind stuff like School Shooter aren't demonstrating anything in terms of technique. At the same time, they are openly stating that it's not supposed to have any message. So what are we left with to judge this as "good?" No mastery of the medium, no mastery of message. It's just a bullshit stunt with no deeper meaning.

 

[Mosop]

I personaly don't narative or setting can stop a game from being good (of course they can make a good game better) as for me a game has to first and foremost play well and be enjoyable on that front. Great gameplay could negate a horrible narrative but not vice versa, if school shooter played incredibly I would consider it equal to the call of duty's/bioshocks/unreal tournament's of the gaming industry.

 

[internetzealot1]

A survive-the-school-shooting-game? Yeah, I'm pretty sure someone did that. As a custom game in Halo 3.

 

[Silinrun]

The closest thing I can recall to "School Shooter" of Japan would be a Manga/Anime/Novel and i think even a live action movie called Battle Royal (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0266308/ the movie).

 

[Ursus Buckler]

It's amazing how much I find Jim easier to tolerate in an article discussing something intellectually than when he's on a video attempting to be funny. It's probably been the first time that I've read something by him that I've actually laughed at.
And assuming it wasn't Bob or James who brought out this new behaviour out of him, why does Jimquisition exist, again?

 

[Arcane Azmadi]

On the second page, Jim said this:

As bad as this particular game may be, I still believe that the controversy surrounding it has exposed the hypocrisy of gamers within the community -- people who have indulged in Grand Theft Auto kill frenzies or have an ironic soft spot for the Postal series. People who are fine with the random murder of innocent and not-so-innocent human beings, provided it's not so contemporary that they cannot safely rationalize it with convoluted justifications.

This is why I cannot even take him seriously on this topic. As I commented in response to their last debate on the topic, comparing Grand Theft Auto to School Shooter is like comparing Steven Colbert to Bill O'Reilly. If you can't see the difference between a gleefully over-the-top narrative fantasy of criminal life and a mindless, brutal, meaningless recreation of horrifying real-life events you're either mentally handicapped or a total sociopath and if it's Jim's opinion that School Shooter is no more offensive than other games, well, his opinion is wrong.

School Shooter is possibly the most offensive game ever made because it exists for only one reason- because the vile scumbag troll who is made it thinks it's cool to piss on the graves of the innocents who have died in school shootings. He's doesn't have a statement to make or any agenda other than offending people and making them angry. That's why the game itself is completely crap- because he didn't want to make a game at all, he just wanted to upset, offend and enrage people. This is NOT freedom of artistic expression. That fucker is a complete monster, the mod is indefensible and anyone who uniroincally tries is probably a complete asshole (but then again, Jim basically trades on his reputation as a complete asshole anyway, so no surprise there).

 

[jmarquiso]

It's amazing how much I find Jim easier to tolerate in an article discussing something intellectually than when he's on a video attempting to be funny. It's probably been the first time that I've read something by him that I've actually laughed at.
And assuming it wasn't Bob or James who brought out this new behaviour out of him, why does Jimquisition exist, again?

He'd said it was to make fun of youtube pundits. Now he seems to have become that in video media.

-J